MIMO communications make use of multiple antennas at both the transmitter and receiver to improve communication performance. SU-MIMO systems may to transmit and receive signals to/from a single station using two or more antennas, while MU-MIMO systems use multiple spatial channels to transmit and receive signals to/from multiple stations at the same time using two or more antennas. In a MU-MIMO system, the signals for the different stations are precoded for transmission on different spatial channels. The precoding allows the receiving stations to separate out the data intended for a particular station. The precoding of signals for MU-MIMO transmission utilizes the feedback of channel information, such as a channel matrix or a beamforming matrix. One issue with this channel feedback is the large amount of overhead associated with transmitting the feedback back to the transmitting station. Due to the size of the feedback, the available channel throughput may be reduced. Another issue with this feedback is the processing overhead associated with generating the channel feedback. Generating and transmitting the feedback increases the power consumption of the stations.
Thus, there are general needs for communication stations and methods for efficiently providing channel feedback for MIMO communications. There are also general needs for communication stations and methods for efficiently providing channel feedback that reduce both channel overhead and processing overhead.